Health Bill [HL]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 20, I shall also speak to Amendments 21, 35, 36 and 37. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee has recommended two changes to the Bill. The first relates to the procedure for exercising powers to create secondary legislation relating to quality accounts; the second relates to consultation by the trust special administrator on the draft report. These amendments act on those recommendations. First, on quality accounts, the committee has recommended that the mechanism for exercising the powers in Clause 6(5) be subject to the negative procedure, including the first occasion on which the power is used. The powers in subsection (5) enable the Secretary of State to make regulations to omit prescribed providers or providers of prescribed services from the duty to publish a quality account. It would not be desirable to list the providers to be omitted for the time being from the requirement, as the policy with regard to these providers will change over time and the flexibility of secondary legislation is needed to ensure that they can be appropriately included or excluded. We originally considered the affirmative procedure appropriate when the power was first exercised, since the intention is to omit specified providers from the ambit of the duty currently under consideration. The negative procedure was considered appropriate for subsequent amendments to those regulations, since the intention is that the power will, in most cases, then be used to extend the duty to publish quality accounts to those previously excluded. The committee considers that the negative procedure should provide an adequate level of scrutiny even on the first occasion. The regulations will be subject to public consultation before we bring them before Parliament and there remains, of course, the option for the Merits Committee to comment on them and recommend further parliamentary debate as appropriate. On the recommendations relating to trust special administrators, new Section 65H of the National Health Service Act 2006, proposed in Clause 13, requires those administrators to consult certain persons specified in that section—for example, staff and staff representatives—on a draft report. Subsections (7)(c) and (10) of the new section currently permit the Secretary of State to prescribe in regulations additional persons from whom the trust special administrator should request a written response, or with whom they should meet. Amendments 36 and 37 change the mechanisms by which the power is exercised from regulations to directions. Amendment 35 is a technical drafting amendment to bring about consistency in wording. Amendments 36 and 37 are in direct response to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee’s recommendations that the mechanism for exercising the powers relating to consultation by the trust special administrator should be consistent for NHS trusts and PCTs. The committee took the view that parliamentary scrutiny was not necessary, favouring the approach that has been taken for PCTs. I am grateful to the committee for its recommendations and I beg to move. Amendment 20 agreed.